WASHINGTON — Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland was at the grocery store the other day when he ran into an elderly black woman who expressed growing concern about President Obama’s safety. Why, she asked, wasn’t he being better protected by his Secret Service agents?
The furor that led to this week’s resignation of the director of the Secret Service resonated deeply among blacks, outraged that those supposed to be guarding the first black president were somehow falling down on the job — and suspicious even without evidence that it may be deliberate.
“It is something that is widespread in black circles,” said Representative Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, who like Mr. Cummings is an African-American Democrat who has been approached repeatedly by voters expressing such a concern. “I’ve been hearing this for some time: ‘Well, the Secret Service, they’re trying to expose the president.’ You hear a lot of that from African-Americans in particular.”
Both Mr. Cummings and Mr. Cleaver said that they did not believe the Secret Service lapses reported recently had anything to do with Mr. Obama’s race and that they had tried to dispel the notion among their constituents. But the profound doubts they have encountered emphasize the nation’s persistent racial divide and reflect an abiding fear for Mr. Obama’s security that has unnerved blacks still mindful of the assassinations of Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It is a longstanding fear. Colin L. Powell’s wife urged him not to run for president in 1996 out of fear that he might be targeted. And when Mr. Obama took office in January 2009, the Secret Service recorded an alarming surge in threats against him. The threat level since then has actually fallen back to a rate more typical of previous presidents, officials said, but potential racial animosity persists in risk calculations by the Secret Service as it seeks to protect Mr. Obama.
The Secret Service does not discuss the nature of threats against Mr. Obama in much detail, but said the agency was fervently devoted to his security.
“The Secret Service is committed to protecting the first family and the president at all costs,” said Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the agency. “We recognize that protecting the president is a sacred trust we have with the American public and that they place in us. It’s never mattered to the service who the president is because we recognize that trust.”
Mr. Obama has consistently made a point of expressing faith in the Secret Service teams that surround him each day. “The president has no shortage of appreciation for the men and women who serve in the Secret Service, their bravery, their sacrifice, their determination, and the hard work and the courage they put on the line every day,” Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman, told reporters on Thursday.
But concern over Mr. Obama’s security has been a quiet but consistent theme from the beginning of his rise in politics. Michelle Obama expressed worry even before he was elected to the Senate in 2004. She later said she dreaded the day he would receive Secret Service protection because it would indicate that threats were being made. And in fact, the agency assigned agents to guard him starting in May 2007, the earliest a presidential candidate has ever been provided protection. [eap_ad_2] It became such a refrain during that campaign that Mr. Obama found himself constantly reassuring supporters even as some of his aides fretted that his possible vulnerability would discourage some blacks from voting for him. “I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Mr. Obama reassured supporters who brought up the issue. “So stop worrying.”
The Secret Service did detect a spate of threats around the time Mr. Obama won the presidency and took office. But without providing numbers, the agency flatly denied reports that he had received three or four times as many as other presidents and added that they eventually subsided. “After his first election, there was a spike in his numbers,” Mr. Donovan said. “They’ve leveled out and they’ve been consistent and similar to his predecessors.”
